From Glastonbury and Steve Jobs to U2 and Bowie: Scotland the Best author Peter Irvine reveals the extraordinary life behind his new novel Crossing the Sound
Peter Irvine’s life has taken him from the early Glastonbury festival and San Francisco’s counterculture to punk music in Edinburgh. The author of the Scotland the Best guidebooks has now written his first novel, Crossing the Sound, drawing on a life spent following music and new cultural movements.
As a student, Irvine travelled widely, including hitchhiking across the United States and following the hippie trail through Asia. He attended Glastonbury in 1970, when entry cost £1 and about 1,500 people were there, and later joined an Oregon commune where Steve Jobs also stayed. Back in Edinburgh in the mid-1970s, he and a business partner began putting on Monday-night gigs, bringing punk and other touring bands to Scotland.
- Peter Irvine has published his first novel, Crossing the Sound.
- His travels took in early Glastonbury, San Francisco and an Oregon commune.
- He helped establish Edinburgh as a stop for touring punk bands.
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Glastonbury began as a small music festival in Somerset in 1970, long before it became a major annual event. Around the same period, young people travelled through the United States and Asia in search of new ways of living, while communes offered shared homes and work.
Peter Irvine later became known for the Scotland the Best guidebooks, but his earlier life also connected him with these travelling and music scenes. In Edinburgh in the 1970s, he helped organise gigs that brought punk and other touring bands to Scotland.
His novel Crossing the Sound draws on these experiences. It offers a fictional account shaped by the social and musical changes Irvine encountered, including the rise of punk and the counterculture.